Čardak Ní Na Nebu Ní Na Zemljí is the title of a Serbian
fairy tale that I was required to read in grammar school
in Croatia. The story has always been less important to me
than the title, which has remained in my memory until this
day. As a child, I considered the possibility of “a castle
neither in the sky nor on earth,” and I was boggled with
questions such as: “Where is it?” and “How is that
possible?” At the same time, the mystery of what this
might mean was very appealing to me—it was beautiful, but
somehow unattainable. As the title of this exhibition, it
alludes to a liminal space, where neither the memory nor
the traces of a particular moment are completely tangible
and cannot be pinned down with total clarity and
understanding. It is a place where things/events/people
are in limbo or flux, in a state of change, a perpetual
twilight.

This exhibition brings together eleven international
artists whose work captures, re-creates, or reflects on
the presence of monuments and memorials—both intentioned
and incidental—as well as monumental and mundane evidence
of the everyday. Remnants of war; political, economic, and
social upheavals; natural and man-made disasters; and
urban and environmental decay are everywhere and ever
present. Our desire to simultaneously remember and
forget—to unite the past and the future in hope of
memorializing the present remains an impossible task.
Many, if not all of the structures depicted or imagined in
Čardak Ní Na Nebu Ní Na Zemljí, have lost their
functionality (or it has been erased or removed), replaced
by an unrealized, ambiguous notion of what is yet to come.

The sculptures I’ve included in the exhibition are
miniaturized replicas of Modernist inspired monuments
commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Tito in the
1960s and 1970s to commemorate sites where battles took
place, lives were lost, and victories were won. Paired
with diorama-like depictions of defunct gas stations
visible throughout the city of New Orleans, they stand as
evidence of compromising socialist regimes and faulty
capitalist economies. Likewise, Malcolm McClay’s vibrant
collages of uninhabited abandoned houses in Northern
Ireland are also testaments to “troubled” politics and a
collapsed economy that contend and compete with ancient
ruins from the country’s tempestuous past. Unlike
structures that have been erected to remember a great loss
of lives, or remain as a result of various socio-political
circumstances, the erasure of the World Trade Center
towers, the absence of these massive towering structures
from the New York skyline, reminds us of the many people
who perished in this tragic event—and the overwhelming
effect this horrific moment has had on the American (and
even, the human) psyche. Christopher Saucedo’s hand-made
paper merge blue and white hues, elevating and abstracting
the buildings from their original context, and allowing
them to float like passing clouds. Z Behl’s mixed media
drawings of the twin towers appear as traces of the
buildings that are now nothing more than ashes.
Transformed into vulva-like forms, they counter the
phallus-shaped structures that once expressed a rhetoric
of power.

Several artists in the exhibition capture the unique
landscape of New Orleans and its tenuous ecology. Hannah
Chalew’s intricately detailed drawings of Kudzu and other
invasive plants that have claimed, or re-claimed,
buildings throughout the city is an unintentional marker
of time as well as evidence of the transformative power of
nature. According to Dawn Dedeaux, her illuminated Steps
Home created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, are
“monuments of loss and beacons for return.” They also
serve as a humble reminder of the many lives that have
never been properly accounted. Castaways and other
abandoned detritus littered throughout the city of New
Orleans are captured in Angela Berry’s series of color
photographs. Inconsequential objects, pictured in the
photos, are removed from their origins and elevated—or
monumentalized—through three-dimensional renderings
illuminated for display.

They Upped Their Game After The Oranges, an architectural
light installation depicting a breathing/thumping cube by
Jane Cassidy. It is an ever changing virtual construct
that thoughtfully challenges the viewer’s perception of
space, imposing a hypnotic, mesmerizing, trace-like
state—which is, perhaps, the flipside of the rallying call
readily administered by totalitarian regimes. It also
alludes to the cyber world into which we are constantly
lulled. Daniel Alley is inspired by the work of William
Frishmuth, who despite great achievements, including the
creation of the diminutive (yet innovative and
unprecedented in its time) aluminum tip of the Washington
Monument, committed suicide in 1883. Alley’s aluminum
sculptures are exact replicas of this tip and embrace the
possibilities and potential of this type of perceived
failure, and how it informs our ideas about success. Sam
Crosby’s floor to ceiling concrete pillar is reminiscent
of Constantin Brâncuși’s Endless Column. Wrapped with a
lattice-like pattern it mimics the ubiquitous material
used to hide the imperfections of domesticity—and the
fallacies of the people who populate these environments.
Cathedrals of the twenty-first century—shopping malls—are
the subject of a series of silkscreen prints that are
accompanied by skylight-shaped cast aluminum sculptures by
Patrick Coll. The architectural forms and structures are
layered in an authoritarian manner, strategically designed
and place to create as he puts it, “a promise of
individual fulfillment and happiness to any who enter
inside.”